Virtualization has quickly evolved into a strategic enabling technology now widely deployed at all levels of the IT stack – from servers and desktops to networks, storage and applications. However, with rising data volumes, lack of cross-domain visibility, and shifting data center roles and responsibilities, today’s virtual environments require more proactive management to maximize the business value of virtualization investments. With even greater growth projected in 2010, Hyper9, Inc. recommends five virtualization management strategies to get the most from your virtual infrastructure:
Top Tips for Optimizing Virtual Environments
1) Minimize VM Sprawl: VM sprawl – characterized by issues such as suspended VMs, VMs that are powered on but not being used, orphaned files, redundant snapshots, out of compliance software licenses and thin provisioning – is wreaking havoc on IT organizations, leading to escalating costs and inefficiencies in virtual environments. Solutions that provide deep inspection and holistic correlation of performance, configuration and historical data across the virtual infrastructure (VMs, VCs, hosts, guests and clusters) can help administrators address operational inefficiencies head-on, minimizing VM sprawl while protecting and increasing virtualization ROI.
2) Understand Storage Parameters: At any given time, organizations need to understand how much disk space is available including which data stores are filling up and how quickly storage is being consumed. Where the focus used to be on acquiring more servers, virtualization has now shifted it to acquiring more storage resources. Dynamic reporting tools that track and alert on thousands of properties in the virtual environment can help administrators ensure proper resource allocations, or make proactive management decisions before key thresholds have been reached. Having visibility into storage bottlenecks becomes even more critical as virtualization moves beyond low hanging fruit applications to supporting the rollout of business-critical applications.
3) Pinpoint Interdependencies: Constant change, blurred boundaries and an inherent state of mobility make it increasingly difficult to pinpoint virtualization breakdowns by source, criticality and interdependency. Tools that provide broad insights across the virtual infrastructure, applications and storage can help organizations prioritize the right management actions at the right time in highly dynamic virtual environments.
4) Tie the Business Back to the Infrastructure: The up-stack migration of virtualization is driving the need to establish better business context around virtual resources – specifically, how they support the delivery of critical applications and services, as well as map to business units, departments and users. Solutions that track global trends around how resources are used, configured and changed over time; that perform capacity planning and troubleshoot performance across infrastructures and applications; and that understand the breakdown of VM and host configurations sorted by labels (departments or lines of business) can help administrators improve visibility, collaboration, control and reporting around business-level management issues.
5) Integrate into Larger Datacenter Strategy: Implementing a successful virtualization strategy depends on being able to leverage open APIs (including PowerShell and Perl) to integrate with existing management consoles, CMDBs, service desk solutions and analytics tools that drive automation workflows across the environment. Additionally, tools that can show the real-time impact of changing resource allocations and usage – from how many VMs have been added in the last week, to who owns the VMs and how are they being used – can help administrators become more efficient and cost-effective in their planning and investment strategies.
“This past year brought significant advancements in virtualization, but organizations are just scratching the surface in terms of what they can achieve,” said Bill Kennedy, CEO at Hyper9. “As we look to the New Year, it’s important to remember that certain basic principles will always apply to a successful virtualization strategy – no matter how small or expansive that initiative might be.”
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
VMware Lowers Operational Cost With Most Advanced Virtualization and Management Solutions
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced independent research convincingly proves that VMware customers are drastically lowering operational expenditures (OpEx) with VMware solutions. VMware vSphere™ and the VMware vCenter™ Product Family lower the day-to-day costs of running IT, enabling IT resources and budgets to be shifted from tactical maintenance to strategic projects that can better create value for the business. "Reducing OpEx with Virtualization and Virtual Systems Management," a whitepaper prepared by ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) for VMware, quantifies how customers have been able to reduce service failures, improve staff efficiency, speed up service deployment and reduce facility operation costs using VMware solutions.
The whitepaper, which includes EMA research and VMware customer case studies, documents how VMware virtualization enables:
Reduction of Service Failures - fixing problems up to 24 times faster, eliminating up to 43 hours of downtime a year, improving uptime to as high as 99.999 percent, to reduce the impact, frequency, duration, and cost of service issues, troubleshooting, out-of-hours support, and productivity loss
Improved Staff Efficiency - increasing administrator efficiency by an average of 10 percent, and as much as 270 percent, by allowing a single administrator to manage up to 1,800 servers, reducing annual management costs by up to $1,000 per server
Faster Service Deployment - allowing new systems to be deployed up to 240 times faster, and new applications up to 96 times faster, saving almost $2,000 in wage costs alone per deployment, while reducing downtime, and improving time-to-market for new products and services
Reduced Facility Operation Costs - allowing approximately half of all organizations studied to reduce both floor space/rent costs, and power consumption, the latter by an average of 16 percent, or around $700,000 per year for a 5 megawatt datacenter
"VMware's ability to help customers dramatically reduce CapEx in the datacenter is well understood, and has been leveraged by hundreds of thousands of customers," said Bogomil Balkansky, vice president, product marketing, Server Business Unit, VMware. "It is OpEx cost reductions that have been the unsung heroes of virtualization. This new research finds that customers are increasingly adopting VMware precisely for OpEx cost reductions derived from superior high availability, disaster recovery and operations management."
"OpEx savings remains one of the most strategic opportunities for customers because it offers the potential to rebalance the cost structure of IT, shifting budgets from ongoing maintenance to innovation and business value," said Andi Mann, vice president, research, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. "VMware vSphere™ enables customers to drive OpEx down through its sophisticated platform, enabling high performance and increased virtual machine densities and advanced features enabling availability and enhanced management. In developing a model for identifying, capturing and measuring OpEx improvements, we hope to provide customers with a valuable tool in achieving this critical business improvement."
The EMA whitepaper also highlights how VMware virtualization and management enable Tucson Electric Power, Attachmate and George Washington University to reduce OpEx cost and do more with existing staff.
"We are growing at a net of 40 servers per year over the last five years and 100 percent storage growth year over year, yet we have been able to accommodate that growth, to triple our workload, without adding a single resource in five years," said Chris Rima, supervisor of IT infrastructure systems, UniSource Energy Corporation and its subsidiary Tucson Electric Power (TEP). "The main hours you save from virtualization are on operational and disaster recovery tasks."
"We've been able to do more with the same staff, and it has really increased productivity," said Raoul Gabiam, IT operations and engineering manager, George Washington University. EMA estimates that virtualization with VMware has reduced or avoided operational costs at around $400,000 each year for George Washington University. "But it is not about us. It is about the customers, the university, their needs -- we have been able to meet their needs, add programs before school starts, even in a window that might be unrealistic on physical hosts."
The whitepaper, which includes EMA research and VMware customer case studies, documents how VMware virtualization enables:
Reduction of Service Failures - fixing problems up to 24 times faster, eliminating up to 43 hours of downtime a year, improving uptime to as high as 99.999 percent, to reduce the impact, frequency, duration, and cost of service issues, troubleshooting, out-of-hours support, and productivity loss
Improved Staff Efficiency - increasing administrator efficiency by an average of 10 percent, and as much as 270 percent, by allowing a single administrator to manage up to 1,800 servers, reducing annual management costs by up to $1,000 per server
Faster Service Deployment - allowing new systems to be deployed up to 240 times faster, and new applications up to 96 times faster, saving almost $2,000 in wage costs alone per deployment, while reducing downtime, and improving time-to-market for new products and services
Reduced Facility Operation Costs - allowing approximately half of all organizations studied to reduce both floor space/rent costs, and power consumption, the latter by an average of 16 percent, or around $700,000 per year for a 5 megawatt datacenter
"VMware's ability to help customers dramatically reduce CapEx in the datacenter is well understood, and has been leveraged by hundreds of thousands of customers," said Bogomil Balkansky, vice president, product marketing, Server Business Unit, VMware. "It is OpEx cost reductions that have been the unsung heroes of virtualization. This new research finds that customers are increasingly adopting VMware precisely for OpEx cost reductions derived from superior high availability, disaster recovery and operations management."
"OpEx savings remains one of the most strategic opportunities for customers because it offers the potential to rebalance the cost structure of IT, shifting budgets from ongoing maintenance to innovation and business value," said Andi Mann, vice president, research, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. "VMware vSphere™ enables customers to drive OpEx down through its sophisticated platform, enabling high performance and increased virtual machine densities and advanced features enabling availability and enhanced management. In developing a model for identifying, capturing and measuring OpEx improvements, we hope to provide customers with a valuable tool in achieving this critical business improvement."
The EMA whitepaper also highlights how VMware virtualization and management enable Tucson Electric Power, Attachmate and George Washington University to reduce OpEx cost and do more with existing staff.
"We are growing at a net of 40 servers per year over the last five years and 100 percent storage growth year over year, yet we have been able to accommodate that growth, to triple our workload, without adding a single resource in five years," said Chris Rima, supervisor of IT infrastructure systems, UniSource Energy Corporation and its subsidiary Tucson Electric Power (TEP). "The main hours you save from virtualization are on operational and disaster recovery tasks."
"We've been able to do more with the same staff, and it has really increased productivity," said Raoul Gabiam, IT operations and engineering manager, George Washington University. EMA estimates that virtualization with VMware has reduced or avoided operational costs at around $400,000 each year for George Washington University. "But it is not about us. It is about the customers, the university, their needs -- we have been able to meet their needs, add programs before school starts, even in a window that might be unrealistic on physical hosts."
Surgient CTO Talks Cloud and Virtualization Patents with VMblog
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Surgient's CTO, Dave Malcolm, to talk about virtualization and the cloud. Surgient has been working with both technologies since 2001, long before most other companies out there, and even longer before the word "cloud" was coined as a term that most of us were willing to talk about in the field or within the media.
And because Surgient has been involved in both of these cutting edge and emerging technologies for so many years now, they've been fortunate as a company to file for and receive granted status on a couple of very interesting and key patents in this market. Here is part of our discussion:
VMblog: In addition to offering virtualization lab management software and providing software for managing the cloud, you guys have also filed and received quite a few patents around "cloud technology." Can you tell us a little bit about the most recent cloud patent granted? Can you summarize it and tell us what it involves?
Surgient: Certainly. Our most recent granted patent, entitled, "Virtual server cloud interfacing," addresses the concept of federated cloud management. It defines the creation and management of multiple architectures of federated virtual server clouds: Inter-Clouds, Extra-Clouds, Super-Clouds, and Exchange Clouds.
The patent defines the management mechanisms for moving, cloning, activating, de-activating, and resource-balancing virtual servers across all four federated cloud architectures. Additionally, the patent describes the process for "follow-the-sun" virtual server activation and de-activation across multiple federated clouds.
This is a broad patent covering a wide range of management and automation mechanisms across four distinct federated cloud architectures.
Patent Details:
US Patent #7574496: Virtual Server Cloud Interfacing
Issued 8/11/2009, Filed 4/17/2002
VMblog: You have some other cloud related patents, don't you? Can you tell us about those as well?
Surgient: Yes, the US Patent Office has granted Surgient six patents on our virtualization and cloud automation technology. I'll describe a few of them here...
The first defines the general principles of virtual server cloud management, and is entitled, "Virtualized logical server cloud providing non-deterministic allocation of logical attributes of logical servers to physical resources." This patent, granted in April 2005, covers the creation of a cloud of virtualized infrastructure and the management mechanisms for the virtual server cloud, including maintaining status information, managing access control, managing resources for virtual and physical servers, server cloning, and the movement of virtual servers across physical infrastructure.
Patent Details:
US Patent #6,880,002: Virtualized logical server cloud providing non-deterministic allocation of logical attributes of logical servers to physical resources
Issued 4/12/2005, Filed 3/18/2002
Additionally, we hold Patent #6,990,666, which covers the dynamic resource management model. The patent defines virtual infrastructure resource allocation management for cost and performance optimization, priority-based scheduling, and over-subscription.
Patent Details:
US Patent #6,990,666: Near on-line server
Issued 1/24/2006, Filed 7/25/2002
VMblog: How important do you believe patents are in today's IT world? And do you continue to work on new and interesting patents today?
At Surgient, we believe innovation is important. We strive to create and maintain a culture of technology innovation, and as such, we continue to make investments in cutting-edge technologies. Patents are a way for us to protect our innovations and to build additional value for our business by reinforcing our technology vision and leadership. As we develop new and innovative technologies, we continue to protect those investments through the patent process, so yes, we are constantly evaluating our inventions and determining which of those need to be protected.
VMblog: It seems like there are some technologies out there that may fall under your patents. What happens here?
What I'll say here is that Surgient has been pioneering cloud automation and management technologies longer than anyone in the industry. We've been an innovator, and that innovation has been reinforced by the granting of these patents by the US Patent Office. Because we've come from cloud roots, our solution is truly a purpose-built platform designed for managing clouds. The Surgient Platform provides the shortest time to value and most advanced technology for managing enterprise private clouds.
And because Surgient has been involved in both of these cutting edge and emerging technologies for so many years now, they've been fortunate as a company to file for and receive granted status on a couple of very interesting and key patents in this market. Here is part of our discussion:
VMblog: In addition to offering virtualization lab management software and providing software for managing the cloud, you guys have also filed and received quite a few patents around "cloud technology." Can you tell us a little bit about the most recent cloud patent granted? Can you summarize it and tell us what it involves?
Surgient: Certainly. Our most recent granted patent, entitled, "Virtual server cloud interfacing," addresses the concept of federated cloud management. It defines the creation and management of multiple architectures of federated virtual server clouds: Inter-Clouds, Extra-Clouds, Super-Clouds, and Exchange Clouds.
The patent defines the management mechanisms for moving, cloning, activating, de-activating, and resource-balancing virtual servers across all four federated cloud architectures. Additionally, the patent describes the process for "follow-the-sun" virtual server activation and de-activation across multiple federated clouds.
This is a broad patent covering a wide range of management and automation mechanisms across four distinct federated cloud architectures.
Patent Details:
US Patent #7574496: Virtual Server Cloud Interfacing
Issued 8/11/2009, Filed 4/17/2002
VMblog: You have some other cloud related patents, don't you? Can you tell us about those as well?
Surgient: Yes, the US Patent Office has granted Surgient six patents on our virtualization and cloud automation technology. I'll describe a few of them here...
The first defines the general principles of virtual server cloud management, and is entitled, "Virtualized logical server cloud providing non-deterministic allocation of logical attributes of logical servers to physical resources." This patent, granted in April 2005, covers the creation of a cloud of virtualized infrastructure and the management mechanisms for the virtual server cloud, including maintaining status information, managing access control, managing resources for virtual and physical servers, server cloning, and the movement of virtual servers across physical infrastructure.
Patent Details:
US Patent #6,880,002: Virtualized logical server cloud providing non-deterministic allocation of logical attributes of logical servers to physical resources
Issued 4/12/2005, Filed 3/18/2002
Additionally, we hold Patent #6,990,666, which covers the dynamic resource management model. The patent defines virtual infrastructure resource allocation management for cost and performance optimization, priority-based scheduling, and over-subscription.
Patent Details:
US Patent #6,990,666: Near on-line server
Issued 1/24/2006, Filed 7/25/2002
VMblog: How important do you believe patents are in today's IT world? And do you continue to work on new and interesting patents today?
At Surgient, we believe innovation is important. We strive to create and maintain a culture of technology innovation, and as such, we continue to make investments in cutting-edge technologies. Patents are a way for us to protect our innovations and to build additional value for our business by reinforcing our technology vision and leadership. As we develop new and innovative technologies, we continue to protect those investments through the patent process, so yes, we are constantly evaluating our inventions and determining which of those need to be protected.
VMblog: It seems like there are some technologies out there that may fall under your patents. What happens here?
What I'll say here is that Surgient has been pioneering cloud automation and management technologies longer than anyone in the industry. We've been an innovator, and that innovation has been reinforced by the granting of these patents by the US Patent Office. Because we've come from cloud roots, our solution is truly a purpose-built platform designed for managing clouds. The Surgient Platform provides the shortest time to value and most advanced technology for managing enterprise private clouds.
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